Multiculturas.
East Africa • Maasai • Nilotic Language Family
Dateline — Longido, Tanzania • Issue No. 412 • Published 14 March 2024
For four decades, a shortwave broadcaster in northern Tanzania has been the only place the Maa language is heard on the air. With the transmitter failing and a new generation tuning out, our East Africa correspondent asks what is lost when a tongue leaves the radio dial.
Read the latest dispatchCurated by the editors • Week of 18 March 2024
Three dispatches from the field — one lead feature and two supporting reads — selected from our 41 correspondents in 38 countries. Indexed by region, language family, and diaspora generation.
West Africa • Yoruba • Niger-Congo Language Family
When the 2023 Lagoon floods erased a third of Lagos's informal neighborhoods, a small team of bilingual cartographers began re-paper-mapping the streets in Yoruba, English, and Portuguese. Their atlas is now the only accurate record the district has.
Western Europe • Basque • Language-Isolate Family
A retired linguist, four singers, and a small open-source model are racing to record the last fluent speakers of a rural Biscayan dialect before the village empties.
South America • Afro-Brazilian • Yoruba-Nago Diaspora
Our most-cited archive feature returns: what 312 hours of recorded testimony changed about how scholars read the Afro-Brazilian diaspora — and what the next volume will add.
From the Archive • 9,400+ articles • 184 communities
A living library, indexed by region, language family, and diaspora generation. Four pieces chosen this month from across six continents — the breadth and depth of long-form cultural journalism, drawn from our archive of commissioned reporting and peer-reviewed scholarship.
East Asia • Ainu • Ainu Language Family
After two generations of suppression, a single teacher in Biratori convinced a school board to teach in Ainu twice a week. Five years in, enrollment has tripled — and Tokyo is paying attention.
South America • Armenian • Second-Generation Diaspora
A century after the Genocide, three family-run cafes in San Telmo still argue that coffee, not language, kept the diaspora whole.
Northern Europe • Sámi • Uralic Language Family
A joint project between herding cooperatives and the Norwegian Mapping Authority is rewriting how the seasonal migration is recorded — and who owns the data.
North America • Punjabi • Indo-Aryan Diaspora, First Generation
For thirty years, a loose network of South Asian long-haul drivers has been mailing cassette tapes between depots, recording sermons, songs, and family news. A graduate student at UBC spent two years tracking the archive down.
You think you are reporting on a community. By the third night, you realise the community has been quietly reporting on you — what you assumed, what you flinched from, and which questions you were too polite to ask. The story that finally runs is never the one I pitched from Madrid.
Drawn from the long-read The Translator’s Notebook: Six Years Inside the Yoruba Diaspora Press
Voices Preserved · Oral History Series
Primary-source oral histories recorded across 184 communities, cited in academic papers and consulted by documentary researchers in 38 countries. Each series is field-recorded, peer-reviewed, and archived with full transcripts.
Brazil · Afro-Diaspora · Yoruba Family
Our definitive oral-history project on the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé diaspora, now cited in 47 academic papers and translated into four languages.
Central Asia · Kyrgyzstan · Turkic Family
Three generations of Kyrgyz eagle hunters speak about displacement, Soviet collectivisation, and the revival of berkutchi tradition on the Chinese border.
South Asia · Tamil Nadu · Dravidian Family
Twelve Kallar women speak in their own words about the sari traditions that bound them — and the daughters who refused the loom.
Europe · Roma · Indo-Aryan Family
Roma families trace a century of movement from the Vlachs of Romania to the brick yards of Manchester — a story no government archive wanted to keep.
The Archive · Indexed for Researchers
More than 9,400 long-form articles are fully indexed across three independent taxonomies, so professors, DEI practitioners, and filmmakers can search the archive the way they actually research — by region, by linguistic family, or by how many generations removed a community is from its point of origin.
Six continental desks, organised by the geography our 41 correspondents actually cover.
Articles tagged to the linguistic family of the community being covered, not the language of publication.
Coverage organised by how far a community sits from its point of origin — the taxonomy educators most often request.